Thoughts on Vanguard from a casual player

Cemm

I’m three or four sessions (two to three hours each) into Vanguard now and thought I’d try my hand at starting a rambling running review of the game from a very casual player’s perspective.  I was a beta tester that really really wanted to like the game, thought it had tons of promise, but refused to pay for my pre-order and subscribe to the game with all the bugs and issues it had going into launch.  

Now I’m back to give it another shot with an open mind and much lower expectations.  It’s worth noting that the system I game on is definitely aging at this point (3.2 GHz P4 with two gigs of ram and a 6800 GeForce video card), so I wasn’t expecting much going in.  Additionally, please keep in mind that I’m not a professional game reviewer and this isn’t an attempt to write that kind of point-by-point system-by-system review of the game.  These are just my opinions about the game as I’m experiencing it this time around, highlighting things that stick out to me as I go.

So, on with the beginning of my running review here.  After several play sessions the last week or so, I have to say I’m really having a great time.  One of the biggest surprises of all so far is that my computer seems to be running the game just fine, relatively speaking.  I am not experiencing massive show stopping lag, or constant crashes to desktop or something (I’ve crashed once while swimming south of Khal).  As far as I’ve seen, the servers have been stable as well.  I don’t have any major complaints to speak of and I think that’s a good thing.

This game IS clearly a beast to run.  You can kind of sense it chugging along if you’re on a dated system like mine and it certainly doesn’t run as smoothly as a game like WoW where you forget all about technical issues because it is so polished.  I genuinely haven’t had any frustration-inducing problems though and that’s the important thing to me.  A relatively rare stutter of the UI here and there (opening a menu and needing to reopen it to refresh it after a graphical glitch), a momentary hitch when crossing the invisible zone lines, but that’s basically it.  I’m not using any UI mods or any of the performance-enhancing tweaks either, so it is possible performance could be improved further.

My character is a human disciple questing in and around Khal.  I haven’t touched crafting or harvesting yet beyond going to meet the tutorial NPCs in Khal and I’ve been really impressed with diplomacy.  I’m enjoying the storytelling part of the system and just having fun with it in general.  I like the multiple avenues to get parts of the stories of the areas of the game world we’re in.  Adventuring, you get a sense that these rat people and local bandits are causing trouble for land based caravans and its through Diplomacy that you get the story behind the story in that case.  It’s pretty fun so far.

The disciple also plays pretty well in combat for me.  I spent a couple of hours giving a monk a shot on Kojan and decided to come back to the disciple.  They seem very similar as martial artists, with the monk supposedly dealing out more damage while the disciple is a healer.  The disciple seems to have better graphical effects in my opinion and just was more interesting to me, so I’m sticking with that for a while.  I feel like I’m doing decent enough damage and it is also pretty nice to self heal or heal teammates as needed.

The game world feels genuinely vast, which is great.  I haven’t the foggiest notion about how the Riftway system works so obviously haven’t tried that yet but I understand that it is designed to bring folks closer together faster.  I can see how it is possible that two characters from different continents could be played for months, maybe forever, without ever crossing paths.  I have no complaints about that though.  I like the idea that the world is so big I might never see it all.

Getting a horse at 10^th level is a huge bonus to the game.  It’s just fun to get to ride around a little faster that early.  The idea of getting a flying mount (once they’re available) and/or a sailing ship sometime down the road is pretty cool too.  I think the ship and house building/owning systems are definitely charms of the game even if it may be a very long time before I experience either.  My understanding is that building a ship or a house can be fairly costly and require a lot of help from others.

Speaking of ‘others’, another welcome surprise while I’ve been playing is the current player population.  I’ve never once felt like I was the only player on Qalia or something like that.  I tend to solo a lot because I’m constantly coming and going and rarely get to play for long, but I’ve found the player community on Seradon to be extremely helpful and good natured.  I’ve had no trouble finding a group when I was looking for one, and people have been really patient with my various newbie questions.  There’s a nice balance of other players out within the areas I’m wandering around in the vicinity of Khal too.

I’ll try to wrap this up before it gets too much longer.  A big thing that leaps out to me after the last few days is that Vanguard, in its current state, is far and away not in as bad of shape as you might be led to believe reading some of the other posts here.  It’s by no means as polished as World of Warcraft or Everquest 2, but it is absolutely playable and enjoyable as it is right now.  The game really reminds me of what a glimpse of an Elder Scrolls MMO might be like.  I haven’t done a lot of research into what Sony has planned for Vanguard in the future, but I hope they keep at it.  I’m going to stick with my disciple character and keep trying to work up adventuring and diplomacy into the 20’s.  Maybe try some crafting or harvesting too.

daeandor

I'm glad you find it enjoyable, I do also.  I'm also glad you are able to run the game as many, with similar or better systems, cannot seem to ever get the game running well.  My computer is even "weaker" than yours and I have no problem running 25 fps + at balanced / high texture settings.  I know many people want 60ish fps in a game, but the reality is that roughly 25fps is what movies run at and that is good enough for me.